to give my orders for the day, to receive reports, or to give audiences to persons who, having been robbed, came to me with their complaints, trusting to having the thieves detected.
Up to the moment of my quitting office, the police of safety—the only requisite police, that which should have received the greater portion of the funds allowed by the budget, because it is on it principally that reliance has been placed—the police of safety, I say, has never employed more than thirty men, nor cost more than 50,000 francs per annum, from which five were allotted to me.
Such have been, at the utmost, the effective force and the expense of the Brigade de Sureté: with so small a number of auxiliaries, and means so limited, I have maintained security in the bosom of a capital, populated by nearly a million of inhabitants. I have broken up all the associations of malefactors; I have prevented their reunion; and during the year since I have left the police, if no new gangs have been formed, although robberies have increased, it is because all the 'first-rate professors' have been confined at the Bagnes, when I had the commission to pursue them, and the power to repress them.
Before my time, strangers and country people looked on Paris as a den of infamy, where it was requisite to keep incessantly on the alert; and where all comers, however guarded and careful, were sure to pay their footing. Since my time, there was no department, taking the year round, in which more crimes, and more horrible crimes, were perpetrated than in the department of the Seine; now there is none in which fewer guilty offenders have remained unknown, or fewer crimes remained unpunished. In truth, since 1814, the continued vigilance of the national guard has powerfully contributed to such results. Never was the watchfulness of a national guard more requisite, and more efficient: but still it must be allowed that, at the period when the com-
